The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is working with a researcher in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community to register scientific datasets produced by a domain collaboration, a recent blog post has reported.

OSTI offers a service for registering datasets to help increase access to digital data from DOE-funded scientific research. Through the DOE Data ID Service, OSTI assigns persistent identifiers, known as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), to datasets submitted by DOE and its contractor and grantee researchers and registers the DOIs with DataCite to aid in citation, discovery, retrieval, and reuse. OSTI assigns and registers DOIs for datasets for DOE researchers as a free service to enhance the Department of Energy's management of this important resource.

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) researcher Ignace Jarrige shown with the sample used in the magnetic refrigeration experiment. Courtesy BNL

For more than 50 years, scientists around the world have attempted to understand the intriguing phenomena of the Kondo effect. When magnetic impurities are added to non-magnetic host materials, their properties display unexpected, anomalous behavior as a result of the Kondo effect. These dilute magnetic alloys, and their unusual behaviors are important tools for scientific research in topics such as ferromagnetism, superconductivity, and other solid-state phenomena. The Kondo effect provides insight into the electronic properties of a wide variety of materials and opens doors to new discoveries.

Just like magic, shape-memory materials have the ability to be transformed into another shape and then return to their original shape—or in some cases even metamorphose into a third shape before returning to their original shape. This transformation is possible because the crystalline structure of shape-memory alloys allows them to sense and respond to their environment. Shape-memory transformation behavior can now be created by thermal, light, or chemical environments. Shape-memory alloys have been used by the research community for well over a decade to accomplish tasks that were not possible otherwise.

The flow of a magnetic property of electrons known as spin current from a magnetic material (blue), to a nonmagnetic material (red). Image courtesy SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Department of Energy (DOE) researchers and their collaborators continued to make significant progress throughout 2015 in the emerging field of spintronics, also known as magnetic electronics. Spintronics could change conventional electronics by using the spin of electrons to store information in solid state devices rather than, or in addition to, the transport of the electrical charge of electrons. This new technology addresses many of the challenges of conventional electronics because it allows for transfer of information from one place to another using much less energy, essentially generating no heat, and requiring little space. The field of spintronics is rapidly advancing and opportunities at the frontiers of spintronics are immense.

By Indian Institute of Technology, copy of image in Robert Stirling's patent of 1816. Wikimedia Commons

A remarkable engine now called the Stirling engine was developed and patented in 1816 by a 25-year-old Scottish clergyman named Robert Stirling. Stirling was devoted to the clergy but inherited a love of engineering from his father and his grandfather, who was the inventor of the threshing machine. Some historians believe that Robert invented his new engine to replace the dangerous steam engines of that time. Even though the Stirling engine was utilized in small, domestic projects, it was never developed for common use and was eventually overtaken by cheaper and more efficient versions of the steam engine and small, internal combustion engines.